Chapter 115: Stuck in Between

There are lots of bad places for writers to find themselves and among the worst is what I call: in between. The term is derived from a baseball phenomenon that afflicts batters caught between overthinking, guessing and bafflement as to how to begin calculating what pitch is coming next. The cerebral muscle memory that has gotten them this far has vanished. They swing late or early or watch a hittable pitch sail by. The baseball commentariat will look down from the broadcast booth and say, mournfully, “he’s in between,” as if they were describing a debilitating illness.

Batters caught in between do a lot of deep breathing between pitches and then, when they strike out or pop up or in some other way fail, shake their heads on the way back to the dugout, barely able to recall a time when it all seemed so easy. Like a week ago.

It is much the same for writers. I know this because lately I’ve been struggling to find my way out of being in between. 

The affliction comes in different forms. As I returned to writing my book after coming back from an intense reporting trip, I found myself caught between the past and the future – between what I had already written and what I hoped to write. What I had written – in this instance a story that my book builds upon – came with an energy when I wrote it almost four years ago. But that quality has felt lacking in what I have been writing recently. I could not seem to reclaim that spark. 

In my in betweenness I found myself thinking of an encounter that followed a story I wrote many years ago in Japan. The subject was the late sculptor, Aiko Miyawaki. She was at the time enjoying great success, with commissions around the world. The commissions came because of work she had already done, and the promise of her doing it again. Miyawaki had made her reputation through an approach she called, Utsurohi, which was essentially to give shape to wind. She did this by arranging metal tubes that, when anchored on both ends and arranged in variously shaped loops, moved with the currents of the air. It was a marvelous thing to see, and many people did, given that over time this became her signature artistic pursuit. 

The thing was: Miyawaki took the same approach over and over again. And while I am not criticizing her work, the way she went about it stood in contrast to that of her husband, the architect Arata Isozaki.

One night, she invited my wife and me to their home, and introduced us to her husband who was well on his way to becoming one of the world’s pre-eminent architects. In the United States he is best known for his design of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.  What I remember vividly from that brief conversation was something he said about his own work: at the end of each project he burned all his drawings, everything. And when the destruction was done, he explained, he was ready to start all over again. 

His wife drew again and again on what she had done before. He wanted nothing to do with his creative past.

I am not so bold as to discard everything I have done before, certainly not when I’m telling a story that emerges from one I’d already begun to tell, albeit with far less knowledge and insight than I have since gained. But the other day, in the throes of in-between despair, I started doing just that. I purposely set aside what I had been doing, which was to work off of what I’d written. Instead I started writing something completely different. 

I changed tenses, from the past to the present. I started with an opening that had no connection to where I’d begun before. I began slowly, haltingly. The prose at first was too busy, too gummy. 

I kept moving forward, and after every paragraph or so went back to trim and revise, hoping to build some momentum – to catch the metaphorical writing wave. It was a shock to the system, and a useful one: each sentence felt as if it was pulling me further away from where I’d been. 

I finished one section and went on to the next. I began to slip; phrases and ideas that had written before began creeping in. I stopped, cut them, stepped away, and returned to the page, searching for new ways forward. I wrote a third section that concluded with an idea that I felt pulled things together. That ending gave the framing of the story a power that I now could see was missing. I wrote 5000 words. Then, as I always do, I asked my wife to have a read.

There are about twelve or thirteen million reasons why I am lucky to be married to my wife and her skill as an editor ranks high; just ask all the writers who’ve been lucky enough to have written for her. 

She read. I held my breath. And when she was done – it took her no time at all; her reading time can be measured in nanoseconds – she first did what all editors should do and offered me some desperately needed praise. My fear of failure lessened, she began explaining where I had gone wrong.

I saw very quickly just what she meant. I had neglected to take readers by the hand. I was racing ahead, moving not in a straight line but weaving this way and that. I was throwing in a lot of material and references and breadcrumbs that a careful and too-patient-by-half patient reader might identify as the pathway forward.

In other words: this was not working. Certainly not as the beginning of a story. But by another, vital measure it was. In writing as I did, in getting out of my head, in allowing myself to see what happened if I began slowly and then with increasing speed to set off in unfamiliar terrain, it allowed me to find the spark I was terrified was lost to me. No matter that I was all over the place.

Go back to what you wrote before, my wife advised, but do not try to rewrite it because that will eliminate the urgency with which you first wrote. Cut and paste – it’s your words, after all. Then set it aside so you can leave the past and set off into the story’s future. 

Finding your way out of being in between begins with a necessary act of self-deception. It can take the form of a memo, a letter to yourself, a short piece in which the measure of success is not as high as it might be for a big project. All are ways to override your existential fear of never being able to write well again. Tricks of the mind and an essential part of every writer’s toolkit.

Those 5000 words may never appear in my book. No matter. They served their purpose. They took me out of myself and allowed me to see through the process of writing, connections and pathways that had been invisible to me. 

I suspect that I am not alone in straddling the creative line between Aiko Miyawaki and Arata Isozaki; the work I have already done informs the work I will do, even as I push to find a way to someplace I’ve never been before.

I suppose you can also call that being in between – though not being stuck in limbo but rather seeing in that sometimes maddening state a path ahead.

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In our newest story, The Birth and Rise of '“Ecocide” author Simone Scriven poses a question that seems particularly apt for our times: How might atrocities against nature be prosecuted as international crimes.

It’s a terrific, urgent and powerful story.